In N.Y. stabbing deaths, portrait of a troubled nanny emerges

By N.R. Kleinfield and Wendy Ruderman

New York Times

Posted:
10/26/2012 09:35:15 PM PDT

Updated:
10/26/2012 09:35:16 PM PDT

NEW YORK -- She was unraveling. Yoselyn Ortega's home was an overcrowded tenement in Harlem that she yearned to leave. She shared the apartment with her teenage son, a sister and a niece. She had been forced to relinquish a new apartment for her and her son and move back. Neighbors found her sulky and remote.

Juan Pozo, 67, a car service driver who used to rent a room in her apartment, said he spoke to her sister Friday, who told him that Ortega had not been feeling well lately, "that she felt like she was losing her mind."

He said the family had taken her to see a psychologist, an account shared by others, including the police.

This was the unfinished portrait that began to emerge Friday of Ortega, the Manhattan nanny who, the authorities said, committed the unthinkable.

Thursday at 5:30 p.m., Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, Marina Krim returned to her Upper West Side apartment with her 3-year-old daughter to discover her two other children, a 2-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, dead of knife wounds in the bathtub and Ortega slashing herself with the same bloodied kitchen knife used on the children.

Ortega, 50, survived, but the police have been unable to question her because she remains in the hospital in a medically induced coma, a deep stab wound in her throat. She has not yet been charged.

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The authorities remain mystified over the motive. Paul Browne, the chief police spokesman, said family members had told detectives that Ortega "over the last couple of months was not herself."

"She was, according to others, seeking some professional help," he said, adding, "There were financial concerns."

Ortega, who the police said was a naturalized U.S. citizen from the Dominican Republic, had worked for the Krims for about two years. She had been referred by another family, the police said, and did not come through an agency, which customarily does background checks. A law enforcement official said Ortega had had no previous brushes with the law, nor have detectives learned of any tensions in her relationship with the Krims.

"No fighting with the mom, the family, the kids," the official said. "Everybody is looking for a reason here." He added, "We've got nothing bad other than the fact that she killed two children."

Friday, the sort of memorial with stuffed animals and flowers that has become sadly familiar in the aftermath of a city tragedy took shape outside the Krim apartment building, as parents pondered what to say to their own children. Disbelief was pervasive in the neighborhood.

The children's father, Kevin Krim, was returning from a business trip Thursday when he was met by the police at the airport.

Kevin Krim learned that his youngest child, Leo, 2, and his daughter Lucia, known as Lulu, had died and that the police had arrested the nanny with whom the Krims were so close that they had traveled to her home in the Dominican Republic. He is an executive at CNBC. Previously, Kevin Krim worked at Yahoo in San Francisco, where they lived before moving to New York about three years ago.

"Everyone at Yahoo offers our deepest condolences to Kevin and his family,'' a Yahoo spokeswoman said in a statement Friday.

Marina Krim did not work but taught an occasional art class at the Museum of Natural History.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles Hirsch, said that Lucia had died of "multiple stab and incise wounds" and that her brother, Leo, of "incise wounds of the neck." They had been clothed, a law enforcement official said, suggesting that Ortega had not been bathing the children.

For about 30 years, according to neighbors, Ortega has lived in a six-story tenement building in Harlem. Before the nanny job, they said, she had worked in factories and as a cleaning lady. A neighbor said the sister she lived with was a taxi driver.

This year, Maria Lajara, 41, a friend who lives in the building, said Ortega had stopped by to tell her how happy she was that she had found a new apartment in the Bronx for herself and her son. She said that Ortega had conveyed how much she loved working for the Krims and that she was paid and treated well.